Terms and conditions

Registration

You need an API key to use the public API. In order to request a key, you need a WOT account. Once you have an account, you can request your API key from this page. After you have requested a key, you will see an API tab in your profile where you can update the information and access the key.

Note: any previous public APIs that did not require registration are deprecated.

Introduction

The WOT reputation system computes website reputations using ratings received from users and information from third-party sources. This section contains a brief introduction to some of the concepts you will need to know to develop applications that use reputation data.

Targets

Reputations are computed for websites, or targets, which are identified primarily by their DNS names. If a DNS name is not available for a target, an IPv4 or IPv6 address may be used instead. WOT also supports Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), which must be encoded to an ASCII representation as described in RFC 3490. For example:

ääkkönen.fi = xn--kknen-fraa0m.fi

Reputations

Reputations are measured for targets in several components. For each {target, component} pair, the system computes two values: a reputation estimate and the confidence in the reputation. Together, these indicate the amount of trust in the target in the given component.

Components

Reputation components are identified by numbers. These are the current components and their definitions:

Component identifier

Description

Example

0

Trustworthiness

“How much do you trust this site?”

4

Child safety

“How suitable is this site for children?”

Note: components 1 and 2 are deprecated. The API will continue returning data for these components to preserve compatibility, but the components should not be used in new applications. Those interested in the type of information that was included in the deprecated components are encouraged to look into categories below.

Reputation and confidence values

The reputation r ∊ {0, ..., 100} is the estimate of the collective trust for the target in the given component. The higher the value, the more the community trusts the website. These are the definitions for the reputation values:

Reputation value

Description

Symbol

≥ 80

Excellent

≥ 60

Good

≥ 40

Unsatisfactory

≥ 20

Poor

≥ 0

Very poor

WOT uses this visual representation to indicate reputations:

The confidence c ∊ {0, ..., 100} indicates the estimated reliability of the reputation r for the {target, component} pair. Again, the higher the value, the more reliable the system considers the reputation estimate.

You should use the confidence value to determine whether an action based on a poor reputation is warranted. For example, the WOT add-on requires a confidence value of ≥ 10 before it presents a warning about a website. Using a higher confidence threshold will result in fewer false positives, but also means your application will catch fewer poorly rated sites. You are encouraged to experiment with different confidence thresholds to see which suits your application the best.

Categories

In addition to reputations, the rating system also computes categories for websites based on votes from users and third parties. Category data aims to explain the reason behind a poor reputation, and you can use the information to more specifically determine what type of action to take when coming across a poorly rated site. The current categories are as follows:

Category group

Category identifier

Description

Negative

101

Malware or viruses

102

Poor customer experience

103

Phishing

104

Scam

105

Potentially illegal

Questionable

201

Misleading claims or unethical

202

Privacy risks

203

Suspicious

204

Hate, discrimination

205

Spam

206

Potentially unwanted programs

207

Ads / pop-ups

Neutral

301

Online tracking

302

Alternative or controversial medicine

303

Opinions, religion, politics

304

Other

Positive

501

Good site

The following categories provide additional information about child safety:

Category group

Category identifier

Description

Negative

401

Adult content

Questionable

402

Incidental nudity

403

Gruesome or shocking

Positive

404

Site for kids

For each category, the reputation system also computes a confidence value c ∊ {0, ..., 100}, similarly to reputations. The higher the value, the more reliable the category assignment can be considered. If you use categories to determine the severity of a poor reputation, you may want to use a lower confidence threshold for the category data.

WOT uses this visual representation for category groups and their confidence:

Third-party blacklists

If a website is included in a third-party blacklist and it's possible that this blacklisting affects its reputation, the API will return information about the type of blacklist the site was found in, and when the site was last added there. Here are the current blacklist types:

Blacklist type

Description

malware

Site is blacklisted for hosting malware.

phishing

Site is blacklisted for hosting a phishing page.

scam

Site is blacklisted for hosting a scam (e.g. a rogue pharmacy).

Note that if a site appears on multiple third-party blacklists of the same type, the latest time it was added to either one of them will be returned.

Requests

The API consists of a number of interfaces, all of which are called using normal HTTP GET requests to api.mywot.com and return a response in XML or JSON format if successful. HTTP status codes are used for returning error information and parameters are passed using standard URL conventions. The request format is as follows:

http://api.mywot.com/version/interface?param1=value1&param2=value2

TLS encryption can be used with all interfaces if requests are made from a secure web page to the reputation API, for example.

Documentation: Reputation API

public_link_json2

The public_link_json2 API is used for requesting reputations for multiple targets.

Parameters

hosts

A list of target names separated with a forward slash (“/”). For example, www.example.com/another.example.net/onemore.example.org/. The value must end with a slash and must include at most 100 target names. Note: the full request path must also be less than 8 KiB or it will be rejected.

callback (optional)

The name of the callback function for a response in the JSONP (JSON with Padding) format.

Return codes

If the call is successful, the returned HTTP status code is 200. If a server-side error occurred, the status code is 500. If the request included an invalid API key or incorrect parameters, the status code is 403. If you have exceeded your daily request quota, the status code is 429.

Output

The API returns a reputations, categories, and third-party blacklist information in a JSON or a JSONP format, depending on whether the callback parameter is specified in the request. The format is as follows:

The response object has one attribute for each target, named by the unchanged target name given in the hosts parameter.

Each target object has a target attribute, which contains the normalized target name.

Each target object also has zero or more component attributes with names ∊ {“0”, ...}.

Each component attribute contains an array with {r, c} values for the reputation component. If the reputation for a component is not known, the corresponding attribute is omitted from the output.